Well, yesterday I picked the entire crop of Loquat, aka Japanese plums
to some. The whole crop off my four foot tall tree weighed 1.25 lbs. I
went through the laborious process of making jam from them. Involves
washing the fruit, scalding it, peeling them, getting the large seeds
and the seed capsule out and then making jam from what's left, which is
not a whole lot out of 1.25 lbs.

Anyhoo, ended up with a half pint jar and a half of a half pint jar, one
of them little bitty jars that Barb is fond of for gifts. Stuff tastes
pretty good but I would hate to clean 20 lbs of them, would take the
whole blooming day. Wife says it tastes sorta like pineapple but it
doesn't to me.

The Bruce plum tree (a REAL Japanese plum) is loaded with blooms but the
pluot, once again, only had a few blooms and none set fruit. The Bruce
is the pollenator for the pluot but so far they aren't having any fun.
The Flordaglo peach is also loaded with blooms but I expected that. The
Ponderosa lemon is blooming, setting fruit, and has fruit from walnut
sized up to about 1.5 lbs but that's its nature. The Kieffer pear didn't
have many blooms this year but I didn't expect many as I pruned about 3
feet out of the top to keep it at 10 feet or below and also took a lot
of water sprouts off of it.

We've almost got the prospective thornless blackberry bed ready, just
need to Roundup the tasteless Dorman raspberries once more plus hit the
Jerusalem artichokes again. Then it will be time to dig up the dead
stuff, any that's still living, put in the backstop that will keep our
rather steep backyard from moving over to the neighbors and then amend
the soil greatly before we can plant, may be another year yet as I am
still unable to do any heavy work.

George